Nina Mûr Spotlight — Madrid-Crafted Wood Eyewear Worth Traveling For

I found Nina Mûr the same way a lot of boutique opticians find brands worth paying attention to — through a colleague at a trade show, who handed me a frame I didn't recognize and watched my face when I turned it over. It didn't feel like acetate. It didn't feel like metal. It felt like wood, because it was wood — and that's not something you run into often at a luxury eyewear case.

Quick Answer — what Nina Mûr is

Nina Mûr is an independent Spanish eyewear studio based in Madrid, founded in 2018 by designer Lorena Serrano. Frames are built from thin laminated layers of Finnish birch plywood — sourced from reforested Finnish forests — with metal hardware, hand cut, sanded, and finished with epoxy resin in the Madrid workshop. Retail runs about $360-$525, up to roughly $680 with made-to-order options. Distribution is deliberately limited.

The studio

Lorena Serrano launched Nina Mûr in Madrid in 2018, building a studio around a genuinely uncommon material choice for eyewear: laminated wood rather than acetate or metal. The name has led some casual write-ups to describe "Nina Mûr" as a single designer's own name — she isn't; it's the studio's brand name, distinct from Serrano herself.

What separates Nina Mûr from most "small studio" eyewear brands is that the material commitment is real, not a marketing gesture. Building a genuinely wearable frame from wood requires solving problems acetate and metal don't have — warping, moisture sensitivity, structural strength at hinge points. The studio's answer is lamination: thin layers of Finnish birch plywood pressed and bonded together, which behaves far more like a stable composite material than a single solid piece of wood would.

The design language

Nina Mûr frames lean sculptural but quiet — the wood grain itself does most of the visual work rather than an elaborate shape or a loud color story. Compared to Anne et Valentin's bold, saturated acetate colorways, Nina Mûr reads as more restrained: the material variation between pieces (wood grain is never perfectly uniform) is the point of interest, not a printed pattern.

A typical Nina Mûr model:

• A birch-plywood body where the layered grain is visible at the edges, not hidden
• Metal hardware for hinges and structural reinforcement
• An epoxy-resin finish that protects the wood while keeping the grain visible
• Understated, often asymmetric shaping that lets the material be the statement

Material construction

Every Nina Mûr frame starts as laminated Finnish birch plywood — thin layers sourced from reforested Finnish forests rather than old-growth timber, a meaningful sustainability distinction for a wood-based product. The layered sheets are hand cut and sanded in the Madrid workshop, then finished with epoxy resin, which both protects the wood and lets the natural grain remain visible rather than covering it with an opaque coating.

Metal hardware handles the hinges and any structural reinforcement points where wood alone wouldn't hold up to daily flexing. It's a genuinely different construction problem than acetate or titanium eyewear, and Nina Mûr's specific answer — deep lamination plus metal reinforcement — is a large part of what makes the brand worth knowing about if you've never handled wood eyewear before.

The price question

Nina Mûr retails for about $360-$525 (up to roughly $680 with made-to-order options), a fair price for genuinely hand-made, non-acetate construction — comparable to or below several acetate-focused European independents working at a similar craft level, like Face à Face at roughly $425-$650. What you're paying for isn't cheaper materials; it's a fundamentally different (and more labor-intensive to engineer correctly) material approach than the acetate-and-titanium norm most of the independent eyewear category runs on.

The fitting experience

Nina Mûr frames need a boutique fitting the way any well-made frame does, but the construction itself is straightforward once fitted — standard hinge mechanics reinforced with metal hardware, not an unusually fragile or high-maintenance build despite being wood. Any skilled boutique optician can fit a Nina Mûr properly.

Wood does respond somewhat differently to humidity and temperature than acetate over the very long term, so if you live somewhere with extreme climate swings, it's worth asking your optician about care specifics — though the epoxy-resin finish is specifically there to manage that.

Where to try Nina Mûr

This is the honest limitation: Nina Mûr's US distribution is small, and we can currently confirm just one boutique carrying it in our directory.

• Gazal Eyecare in Roswell, Georgia — carries in-store stock, and you can also shop Nina Mûr online through Gazal Eyecare.

Search the boutique locator for other dealers as our coverage grows.

The bottom line

Nina Mûr is the recommendation for someone who's tired of the acetate-everywhere default in independent eyewear and wants to see what a genuinely different material story actually looks like. Laminated Finnish birch plywood, hand-finished in Madrid, at a price that undercuts most brands working at a comparable craft level. If you've never handled real wood eyewear, this is worth the trip to try in person.

Find a Nina Mûr dealer, or start with Gazal Eyecare in Roswell — currently the only confirmed US stockist in our directory.